Discussion

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

trelane: Thread on the Collabora post he authored: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305TDF's response got posted but did not gain traction here (so far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609108

bakugo: Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who do not contribute directly to development at all?Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?

yuumei: Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just another corporate take over of an open source project.

mikkupikku: From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed. For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites.)

tclancy: Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct. These stories could be about anything and you gamergate veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw in wild speculation about whether they use “master” as their main branch name, “slave” as backup database terminology or “allowlist”. You know, any of those things that are keeping America from being great and winning the war.

mikkupikku: What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better opportunity for parasitism in some other org.

khalic: They’re relaunching Libre Office online apparently, they don’t want competitors on their board I’m guessing

cap11235: Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" despite their daily dramatics, myself included.

roenxi: [delayed]

bee_rider: Clearly is stands for the Tiscrete Dourier Fransform

vntok: > The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.

torginus: So essentially 'we f**ked you over but we still expect you to do the work'?

khalic: So, basically, TDF doesn’t want Collabora (a company) people on their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems… suspicious.

zhongwei2049: Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.

throwawee: Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

homebrewer: I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.

steve1977: These parasitic patterns are also visible in lower management levels, not only boards (not disputing your point, just adding to it).

chuckadams: [delayed]

DonHopkins: Trump Derangement Foundation?

steve1977: > Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization.I guess the question is does the size of the organization match the scale of what they want to accomplish?

bee_rider: Based on that table it looks like “LibreOffice the name” ejected “LibreOffice the software development project” basically. Although, it isn’t really a corporate takeover, right? There was one company that was doing most of the work, now they’ve been ejected.So why not just fork it under a new name.

ike____________: Tour de France, obviously.

nicman23: Transform Daddy Fourier

vntok: For free!

fn-mote: > So why not just fork it under a new name.Again? Sigh. Isn't that how we got LibreOffice in the first place? (From OpenOffice.)

janvdberg: I tried changing it, but I guess when a post hits the fp this is not possible anymore (only by mods).

duskdozer: I might not be the target audience here but reading this I'm having trouble understanding what actually happened and why.

sgbeal: Please help me understand where the missing comma is supposed to be in:> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty people who ...Is it:1) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners, over thirty people ..."2) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty, people who ...":-?

c-c-c-c-c: seems like a lot of drama in the open source document space, this seems unrelated to the OnlyOffice fork [1]. Interesting future ahead![1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168

lstodd: It's related in the sense that the EU push to free software office is what precipitated all this drama.

refulgentis: While anything is possible, we can rest assured that if there was any evidence of subterfuge / sandbagging, given our own involvement in the situation, they would have shared it at some point, surely in their main response.

replooda: OpenBSD, a rather more complex project, seems to be doing fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sensed you conflated it with in your non sequitur.

jaapz: There are many open source projects out there that accomplished many things on an insane scale that are driven by single developersOr do you mean scale of organization?

psychoslave: That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.

mikkupikku: Yes absolutely.

yomismoaqui: Freeoffice as the next name? Seems like they are exhausting them quickly.

phkahler: How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.

kstrauser: I read that as they’re ejecting all but 30 people.

clcaev: Why do these foundations (like Mozilla) have direct products anyway? Who should the users be and why? Who are the collaborators and competitors? These are hard questions.Democratic organizations often need varying classes of membership, like legs on a stool. Stakeholder interests can reflect direct contributions or emergent dependence. An unbalanced capture by one leg is the true issue.

cge: I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.[1]: https://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/oracle-want... [2]: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101... [3]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...

salawat: :tabnew<Enter>a Begone Emacs harlot! The user's of the one true universal editor will not be done away with so easily!<Esc>:wq!

ecshafer: > There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that.I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get a corpo board seat.

toyg: I mean, I like openbsd the product, but the community culture is notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies.

NetMageSCW: That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.

Tuna-Fish: LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.